Better to keep your mouth shut and seem a fool than to open it and remove all doubt
I'm not saying the guy was a few sandwiches short of a picnic. He was your average C- student at Andover. Still he managed to get into Yale--legacy and all. Kid always could draw a pat hand from a stacked deck. But there was a hitch in his giddy-up when it came to pursuing ideas. Had a set of fixed ones and left it at that. When he decided to run for president, he knew so little about foreign policy, his father brought in an expert to fill him in on international affairs. His tutor was the family friend Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the longstanding Saudi ambassador to the States. Prince Bandar was the most Westernized member of the House of Saud. That family was so rich they could eat fried chicken all week long. But even with this Arab Gatsby's tutelage, George W. Bush's understanding of foreign policy stayed pretty basic. There was good, and there was evil, and there was no room for subtlety in telling them one from the other. I'm not saying he had a big hole in his screen door, but the flies were getting in somehow.
Why close the barn door after the horses are out?
You can't totally blame him for being asleep at the wheel on 9/11: any mule's tail can catch cockleburs. But the National Security Council did meet 22 times between his inauguration and September 11, 2001, and George W. Bush didn't show up once. The CIA had 70 ongoing investigations into what it considered domestic Al Qaeda activity. On August 6 their briefing memo, titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.," said Al Qaeda members were already in the U.S. and showing signs of wanting to hijack aircraft. It was the 44th CIA briefing Bush got that brought up concerns about Al Qaeda. Richard Clarke, head of the National Security Council's Counterterrorism and Security Group, testified later that top administration officials like National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice were unconcerned about terrorism. When Clarke raised the issue of Al Qaeda, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz insisted that Iraq was a bigger terrorist threat. Why focus on this one guy, Bin Laden? Quit hollering down the rain. Yeah, thought Clarke, lord willing and the creek don't rise.
Don't dig up more snakes than you can kill
Folks called it "Bush Doctrine" but that makes it sound all gussied up, like it was hammered out in deep thought and meaningful conversation, rather than the upshot of the president getting in a horn-tossing mood after 9/11. He had his tail up and people would have to pay, damn it, not only the terrorists, but any nation that gave them aid and comfort. It was a full-fledged "war on terror" and God had put him on this green earth to lead it. "I'm a war president," he said. 'Course, this is guy who joined a "champagne unit" in the Air National Guard to get out of being drafted and then dropped out before completing his service, but now he's the commander-in-chief and jumping like hot grease on a skillet. He was itching to invade Afghanistan. He was itching to invade Iraq. He made a hornet look cuddly. When some of his advisors pointed out that declaring war for the purpose of retribution went against international law, he fumed "I don't care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass." And then he went out and got his own ass handed to him on a plate.
You catch more flies with honey than vinegar
Once the assault on Afghanistan kicked off, he was so busy you'da thought he was twins. Right away, he signed an executive order asserting that captured detainees would be tried by military tribunals rather than courts of law. This meant they would be denied the legal guarantees of the Constitution. But they would also be denied the protections of the Geneva Convention that applied to court martial procedures under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. This was as welcome as screwworm to the military brass. The Department of State wrote up a 40-page memo on why that dog wouldn't hunt. And America's allies were madder than wet hens. But the administration went ahead with it and spawned a whole new language in the process. Detainees were subject to "extraordinary renditions," where they were flown to secret "black sites" in unnamed countries and then subjected to bootleg "enhanced interrogation techniques." Many "illegal enemy combatants" were transferred to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, established by Bush as a detention camp. At least 780 people have been held at the camp; only 16 have been charged with a criminal offense. It was all as crazy as Larrabee's calf.
Whistle before you walk into a stranger's camp
Afghanistan was one thing, but invading Iraq to topple Saddam Hussein was a whole 'nother bucket of possums. The most damn fool thing W. ever did. The UN demanded nuclear weapons inspections and Iraq was complying. The inspectors were reporting no weapons. Bush sent Colin Powell before the UN to offer up the CIA's evidence showing Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. It was like putting socks on a rooster. Powell himself argued against the invasion. What was the plan for setting up a Western style democracy in the Middle East, he asked? Toppling Saddam was far more likely to lead to chaos. And you break it, you buy it. So America bought it, invading in March 2003 with a "coalition of the willing"--Bush's way of not talking about how unwilling darn near all of the world remained. And as even Donald Rumsfeld predicted, instead of being treated as liberators, American troops were as welcome as a tornado on a trail drive. Still, less than two months in, Bush stood in front of a "Mission Accomplished" sign on an aircraft carrier and announced that we were heading for the wagon yard. The war would go on for eight more years. And Iraq went to hell in handbasket. The guy sent to run the place, Paul Bremer, was a bull in a china shop. The American occupation created a sectarian civil war that metastasized into an insurgency that spawned a new breed of terrorists, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. The war, in short, created ISIS. Chickens do come home to roost.
A guilty fox hunts his own hole
Right after 9/11, Bush authorized a secret NSA program that allowed warrantless surveillance of anyone thought to be communicating with terrorists, even Americans in America. The New York Times found out and was planning to publish the story in 2004, before the election. Bush convinced them to sit on it in the interest of national security. Told them you can't get lard unless you boil the hog. So they sat on it. The Times grew a backbone in December, 2005 and published the story, but by then Bush had been re-elected. There was a big brouhaha. But given the ever-increasing ability of the national security apparatus to scrape data off the internet as quick as a chicken eats Junebugs, the whole outcry feels today like spitting in the wind.
A dead snake can still bite
In 2005, the Supreme Court in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld declared that Bush had exceeded his authority in creating military tribunals. Right off, the CIA started getting as nervous as a fly in a glue pot. Some of them might go to jail. Many in the Bush administration, including Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, tried to talk the president into shutting down the program. "Democracies don't disappear people," Rice told him. "Don't let this be your legacy." Dick Cheney disagreed. On his advice, the president sent legislation to Congress that would grant him permission to establish military tribunals to try terrorists. Congress passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006, essentially overriding SCOTUS and making military tribunals legal. There's more than one way to break a dog from sucking eggs.
Don't piss on me and tell me it's raining
For three days after Hurricane Katrina blew through New Orleans like a bull through a paper gate, it seemed like the only person in the nation who wasn't concerned was the president.
When Bush finally did respond, it was in such a half-assed way some folks called it racist. From being photographed gazing impassively out the window of Air Force One to telling the failing FEMA director Mike Brown "you're doing a heck of a job, Brownie!" the president seemed as confused as a goat on AstroTurf. He burned daylight while the nation watched a slow motion trainwreck. 1836 people died as a result of Hurricane Katrina, more than $100 billion worth of property was destroyed, and nearly 2 million people were displaced, many forever. It was sad enough to bring a tear to a glass eye. And Bush, well he ripped his britches. He never recovered his good approval rating.
Pigs get fat; hogs get slaughtered
Shoot, you almost feel bad for the guy when it comes to the financial meltdown of 2008. I'm not saying he was a few bricks shy of a load, but economics was not his thing. So when Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and Fed chairman Ben Bernanke come to him and say hey, a whole bunch of folks are defaulting on their mortgages, he says well, maybe people shouldn't have gotten themselves in so much debt. Finally, he agrees to do something for struggling families. But then Paulson and Bernanke come to him and say, hey the banks bundled up those mortgages and sold them to Wall Street investors like Bear, Stearns, which is now going bankrupt. We need to bail them out. And Bush says, why should the government bail out some Wall Street a-holes who made bad investments? And Paulson and Bernanke say, trust us. So he does and they bail out Bear Stearns. And then Paulson and Bernanke come to him and say Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are going down. And he says who are they? And they say, they're government-sponsored enterprises that buy mortgages and repackage them as investments. And he says, wait, the government is in on this thing? And Paulson and Bernanke say yeah. So they bail them out too. And then Paulson and Bernanke come to him and say Lehman Brothers is going bankrupt, but we're gonna let them. And W. says, great, finally we let the market work the way it's supposed to! And Lehman fails and everyone panics and suddenly AIG is going down. And Paulson and Bernanke come to him and say we gotta bail out AIG because it's insurance. And he says why does insurance matter so much? And Paulson and Bernanke say, trust us, it touches everything. So they essentially nationalize AIG. But by then it's a stampede and Paulson and Bernanke come to him and say this is a full-on financial panic and if you don't spend a trillion dollars, it will be worse than the Great Depression. And he says what are you even saying? And Paulson and Bernanke say, we can explain it to you but we can't understand it for you.
So this free-market guy who hates government handouts sends legislation to Congress authorizing $700 billion to buy up toxic mortgage-backed securities and save the banking industry. Every Republican in Congress and even some Democrats vote no. The next day the Dow plunges 777 points, the biggest single-day loss ever, and Congress scurries back and votes again. This time the Troubled Asset Relief Program passes. It stops the financial meltdown, and in the end, the government nets $15 billion when the market recovers and they resell the assets. So it was not only the right thing to do but a financial win for the Fed. There's no tree but bears some fruit!
The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree
PEPFAR, Bush's anti-AIDS program in Africa, was another thing that drove the right nuts. It promoted safe sex. The program made the United States government the world's largest purchaser of condoms. Not bad for the son of the guy Texas nicknamed "Rubbers."
43: George W. Bush